Alas, not even the Library is immune to the passage of time.  While founding member Chris stuck with us through 4½ years of highs, lows and quality fanfiction, he has withdrawn from the project due to life circumstances significantly impacting his pony time.  He hopes to continue blogging at One Man’s Pony Ramblings as his schedule permits.

Fortunately, we have a new curator eminently worthy of filling his formidable horseshoes.  FanOfMostEverything has joined us, bringing a lengthy track record of acclaimed stories, vast reading habits, episode/comic encardenings, and general positivity.  His commentary will start showing up on features in the near future.  Welcome, FOME!

We’ve updated our About page with the personnel changes.  Including Soge’s bio, which was found in a corner inside a puddle of suspicious green goo.  Horizon denies everything.

Sometimes, as Hearth’s Warming rolls through and Auld Lang Syne looms, it’s worth taking a moment to stop and reflect on the year we’ve had.

Pony-wise, despite all the early episodes and big leaks, the fandom is still going strong.  We’re honored to remain a part of that!  Thank you, featured authors and readers alike, for being a part of this crazy equine fanfiction train.

We’ve got a full handful of features pending once the authors complete their interviews — and more in the pipeline as we get through our reading.  The holidays, however, seem to be an exhausting time for an awful lot of us.  So for this week we’re just going to spend some time with friends and family, and hope you get to do the same.

If you’d like to temper that with some reading, though, we’ve got four years of wonderful features to catch up on (as well as a number of equally solid suggestions in our story recommendation thread).

Either way, enjoy the rest of your year!

We hope that our American and American-adjacent readers had an excellent Thanksgiving holiday filled with food, friendship and magic!

Every once in a while we at the RCL need a break to enjoy those things, too.  So we’re skipping a week and giving ourselves a chance to catch up on our pony reading.  We’ll be back with more features next Friday!

If you’d like some quality stories, we’ve got over four years of archives to mine for tales to read — and if you’re one of the dedicated readers who has seen them all, let us know some other of your favorites.

We have received several complaints regarding a recent interview response which advocated, and appeared to incite, violence against people of different political beliefs.  We have removed that material, and would like to apologize to our readers for our error in judgment in publishing it.

Publishing sometimes involves tradeoffs between competing principles.  When we originally reviewed the interview before publication, it was the first time in 3½ years that we’d received such an inflammatory statement.  We faced a choice between free speech (one of our goals is to give our featured authors an open platform that lets them present themselves as they wish to be) and community standards (one of our goals is to make positive contributions and draw people closer together in the spirit of the show).  In hindsight, we made the wrong choice.

It’s easy — and tempting — to err on the side of free speech by drawing a mental line between the words that we write and the words that we copy-and-paste from the featured author.  But that’s also incorrect.  We are ultimately responsible for all the words put out under our name, even if they were written by someone else.  Publishing advocacy of violence was an abdication of that responsibility, and that isn’t the sort of example we want to set.

It’s been a busy two years of reading, evaluating, and spotlighting stories for our weekly author interviews.  With Christmas falling on a Friday this December, we at the Royal Canterlot Library are taking our first day off.  Rest assured, though, we’ll be back next week to feature another excellent piece of pony fanfiction.

In the meantime, now is a good time to take advantage of a suggestion from RCL curator Chris, and give one of your favorite authors the gift of a thank-you for how their story made a difference to you.  If you’d like a starting point, browse our list of previous features, with 100+ top-notch stories.  Did one of them move you?  Help you come to a realization?  Teach you the bon mot that landed you that sweet job at the trivia factory?  Let the author know!  There’s no greater compliment than to hear you’ve made a difference.

For readers and authors alike, happy holidays to you all.

Just as a short reminder, we are now entering the last couple of days of voting for the Royal Canterlot Library’s second anniversary feature. Be sure to visit the thread on our FIMFiction group to cast your vote! Currently, stories by previously featured authors Cold in Gardez, Estee, GhostOfHeraclitus, Inquistor M, Kegisak, KitsuneRisu, Skywriter, The Descendant, and xjuggernaughtx are up for consideration, and we have a pretty close race developing, so your vote could make the difference!

As it so happens, we are quickly coming up on the second anniversary of the Royal Canterlot Library’s first interview. Yup — two years’ worth of interviews with some of this fandom’s best writers!

We thought we’d do something special to mark the occasion. So, in celebration of 2 years of RCL, we ask you, our readers: For our 2^nd anniversary, who would you like to see featured a 2^nd time?

For the next week and a half, we are accepting nominations for stories written by one of our previously featured authors, but one different than the story we featured. And what’s more, we’re letting you guys pick. That’s right — you’ll be able to vote for the story you’d like to see us feature for our second anniversary!

Just head over to this thread on our FIMFiction group for details on how to nominate and vote for stories. Voting will close October 4th, so get those nominations in soon!

As a quick administrative note, I’ve created an “Archives” page listing the Royal Canterlot Library’s features alphabetically by author, and provided a permanent link to it on the top navigation bar.  It’s a great way to see what sort of company spotlighted stories keep!

Another great resource worth pointing out is fanfic review blog City of Doors.  Griffin has undertaken the monumental task of collecting and linking reviews from every ponyfic review blog — including the RCL, and its curators — and compiled them into a huge master spreadsheet.  If you’re wondering if your MLP fanfic has gotten outside attention, that might just be the single most informative page on the Internet.

On to today’s feature!